Why you can't just hire creators "who can understand and explain technology in a compelling way"
Devrel twitter has been very excited about one of our own going viral for a simple observation:
In many ways, you have to marvel at how this should be framed up in the Hall of Fame as the perfect professional industry tweet:
It is short, fortune cookie length. No linkedin yaps here.
It’s true enough:
It lets people self promote:
It leaves enough questions unanswered to require followup questions
It is open to interpretation, it allows everyone to just say their job is important when they often feel unimportant, even if their statement is actually plainly wrong (in fact being wrong is good for engagement):
If you are cynically studying how to grow your Twitter following just for the sake of vanity, you could do worse than breaking down how viral tweets like these work and then sprinkling a few of these in each week to see what catches. I don’t have the example live but there are plenty of examples of posting the same content or joke slightly reworded each time and the last attempt finally really taking off.
But enough snarking; My actual answer is that you ALMOST can’t hire these people (for lack of a better word, I’ll call them “creators” just to avoid getting into the job title discussion). I wanted to break down why.
Most companies don’t ACTUALLY want creators, they want sales and marketing
Most startups probably do not have interesting, frontier tech worth explaining. This might sound like a cynical view, and I applaud all founders taking their leaps, but statistically it must be true. Your B2B AI CRM SaaS wrapper of Supabase + OpenAI isn’t intrinsically that compelling, you can’t squeeze blood from a stone.
Yet these startups are often the ones who want most to hire a devrel person to magically make them interesting… in order to sell, not to explain.
The kind of people who see the world in black and white like this cannot comprehend doing a thing for its own intrinsic value; Art only has worth when it can change hands at Sotheby’s. Their words tell you all you need:
Intentions matter. While great technical content can come from anyone and anywhere with any goal, it is much more likely to arise without a CTA or CTR KPI hanging over the writer’s head.
Creators want to horizontally explore, but you need vertical focus
Because of the dearth of actually interesting frontier tech in the world, and specifically, in your company, most creators need to jump from company to company to stay interesting and continue to build their following. Exceptions exist; it’s easy to point to Dan Abramov and React from 2015-2020; and LeeRob and Vercel from 2020-2025 as examples of people who just stayed on topic for a long time, but both they and their employers had rare depth and followthrough that made them the exception to the rule.
For everyone else, you need to react to things and be able to talk Apple one day and CloudFlare the next.
Or to get meta about job market and economics and AI protocols:
You know who’s really good at “understanding and explaining technology in a compelling way"?
MKBHD. Cleo Abram. Mark Rober. Grant Sanderson. They jump from topic to topic to topic and always manage to make it fascinating; but that starts by having the freedom to roam outside of always shilling your company’s product.
You know who they work for?
Themselves.
Creator Economy Made Them Unhireable
The top dev YouTubers currently take charge between 50-100k per sponsor; the top Substackers have tens and hundreds of thousands of paying subscribers. This means instead of working for you, the really good ones can just work for themselves and make >$2m/year just being themselves.
Uphill DevRel vs Downhill DevRel
In my finance days there often a discussion about “value of the seat” vs “value of the trader”. Similarly I think there should be some healthy caution when hiring somebody who is from an already-popular company, coasting on the momentum of the company, vs someone who has had to fight their way up for a comparatively unknown company.
So, what to do?
My normal prognosis is very bleak. If this model of how the devrel industry is accurate, then churn is very high for 2 reasons: 1) there is far more demand than supply for good talent, and 2) good talent “graduates” quickly to working for themselves. The average “good devrel tenure” ends up being 2-3 years as a result (again, we are making crazy generalizations, great devrel folk working for 20+ years at the same company are immensely powerful, I’m not encouraging this state of affairs, merely trying to describe it as accurately as possible).
My constructive suggestions for what to do are repeats of themes already covered on this blog:
